“Basta!” her mother said, standing up abruptly. Her face flushed through the thin, broken skin of her cheeks. She fairly shook in her flowered housedress. “I’ll go down there right now!”
“What? Where?”
“I’ll go down to that office right now and tell that witch she’s not putting my daughter on no murder case!”
Mary closed her eyes, mortified. “You’re not doing that, Ma. The office is closed. Bennie’s not even there.” She didn’t mention that her mother couldn’t drive. It didn’t seem like the right time.
“I’ll go tomorrow morning. I’ll tell her. She’ll listen to me, I’ll make her!”
“Ma, it’s my job.”
“Then you quit!”
Mary almost laughed. “I can’t do that. I have to make a living. My rent alone is-”
“Move home!” She threw her arms in the air, her elbows knobby and her underarms slack. “Don’t tell me you’re too old! Camarr Millie, her daughter lives at home and she’s thirty-six!”
“I’m not quitting. I’m a lawyer, I like my job,” Mary said, not believing the words even as they fell from her mouth. Who could sell a happy lawyer?
“Matty, talk to her,” her mother barked, nudging her husband, and Mary realized for the first time that her parents played on a tag team of their own. She looked at her father, and pain twisted his features as he tugged the napkin bib from the neck of his T-shirt. He didn’t say a word, and still a knife of guilt went through her.
“Pop, it’s my job,” Mary said. “I have to do my job.”
“We thought you wasn’t doin’ no more murder cases, baby,” he said softly.
“I can’t pick and choose, Pop. You know that, you worked. Could you have one of your crew picking his own work?”
Suddenly her mother pushed her chair under the table, her eyes edged with tears, and hurried from the kitchen. “Ma, wait!” Angie called out, and bolted from the table after her. Judy looked astonished, and Mary tensed in the stifling kitchen.
Her father reached across the table and touched her hand, his palm warm. “Mare, I’m not gonna tell you your business. All I’m gonna tell you is boxing is a mean business, a dirty business. Lotsa people get hurt. Make sure you’re not one of them.”
“Don’t worry, Pop,” Mary said, the words hard in coming.
Watching the scene, Judy felt dumbstruck. Her mother didn’t cry. Her father didn’t call her “baby.” Her family preferred their melodrama on a television movie-of-the-week, behind a curve of expensive glass. Or on a stage, at a distance. Yet, as moved as Judy was by the emotion of Mary’s parents, she was struck by their words. Matty DiNunzio was right. Boxing was a dirty, dangerous business. Maybe the Della Porta murder had less to do with cops and more to do with boxers. The lawyers had been following Connolly’s theory, but Judy didn’t trust Connolly the way Bennie did. She decided to follow up, alone. She didn’t want to put Mary in harm’s way. She didn’t want her best friend hurt.
And she certainly didn’t want to answer to Vita DiNunzio.
29
Bennie cruised the block in the dark before she pulled up in front of Della Porta’s rowhouse, making sure there were no news vans or reporters out front. Trose Street was quiet, with only a few people out. She parked and locked the Expedition, got out with the case file, and plucked through her keys until she found the one to Della Porta’s apartment.
Bennie climbed the stoop to the entrance, unlocked the inside door, and went up the stairs to the apartment. She opened the door at the top of the stair, thinking about Connolly. How it must have felt for her to come home to this apartment, to Della Porta. What it was like to find him dead. Bennie had experienced that horror herself, except that she’d loved profoundly the man she’d found. How could this happen to both her and Connolly? Wasn’t it too coincidental?
She opened the door, entered the apartment, and flicked on the switch for the overhead light. The apartment looked the same as before, the living area on the left, with the bloodstain. She walked to the faintly rusty outline and flashed on the awful day she saw the pool of blood on her lover’s desk. Bennie stared at the bloodstain, deep in thought. She had to admit that she was starting to feel, more than she could logically justify, that Connolly was her twin. Maybe because Bennie had watched Connolly, observed the way she looked and acted. Noted her mannerisms and the coincidences in their lives. Yet the more time Bennie spent around Connolly, the more she felt she understood her, even as she trusted and liked her less. It was paradoxical, but Bennie was starting to feel of Connolly in some way. It was an uneasy sensation, being suddenly uncomfortable in her own skin.
Bennie stared down at the stain. Blood. It always came back to blood. She had to win this case. She had a duty, not only as Connolly’s lawyer, but maybe even as her sister. And there was one way to win. The ethics of it were arguable, but at the same time, she had an equal ethical duty to represent her client as zealously as possible. It was a thorny problem, but most were, in the law, and that’s what kept it interesting.
“Just get on with it, girl,” Bennie said aloud, and hurried to the bathroom to save Connolly’s life.
Snip, snip, went the scissors. Bennie had bought them at a drugstore on the way over and they were more suited to construction paper than hair. She squeezed the orange handles and tried again, cutting a strand of hair near the front of her face.
Snip. The honeyed strand fell to the sink, where Bennie had spread out the day’s newspaper from her briefcase. Her hand moved an awkward inch to the back of her head and she grabbed another hank of hair.
Snip, snip. A chunk fell to the newspaper, and she checked the bathroom mirror. The front part of Bennie’s hair was now clipped in layers. She already looked more like Connolly, even given the difference in their hair colors. Clearing the hair from her forehead emphasized the similarity in their eyes.
Bennie looked at her reflection and imagined the way she and Connolly would look at counsel table, identical sisters, side-by-side in front of the jury. It would have to affect the jurors. Bennie knew she could get a jury to trust her; it was her greatest strength as a trial lawyer. And if she could get the jury on her side, it wouldn’t be much of a leap to get them on Connolly’s. Especially if every time they looked at Bennie, they saw Connolly. And vice versa.
Bennie chopped away, preoccupied. Her first approach to the case-hiding the fact that she and Connolly were, or might be, twins-was wrong, and untenable now that the news was live at five. If the media was flogging the story that they were twins, why not go with it? Why not turn it to Connolly’s advantage? If Bennie went public with the twin issue, played it up, then every article the press wrote and every story they printed would generate sympathy for Connolly. The buzz had to reach the potential jurors, with the trial only a week away. Suddenly the tight time frame became an advantage, too.
Bennie smiled grimly as she hacked away. It was a great plan, and there was no way the D.A. could counter it. Even if Judge Guthrie issued a gag order, the press would be off and spinning. Every “no comment” would tantalize. Snip, snip, snip. Bennie had disguised herself in the past, to look less like herself. This time she was disguising herself to look more like herself. A mask, inside out. If Connolly was her twin, the mask was Bennie’s true identity.
She made a final cut and set the scissors on the edge of the sink. Snippets of blond hair covered the newspaper and filled the basin. She admired even her crude handiwork, turning her head left and right in front of the mirror. Her head felt lighter; she felt freer.